What would happen if the borg queen died?
- Thread starter blockmaster2001
- Start date
Except we know that's not the case here. Again, we know that the Borg Queen has "died" multiple times. But the consciousness/programming of the Queen doesn't die, because that consciousness isn't limited to that single host body, it's distributed throughout every drone and every ship in the Collective. That's what a collective consciousness is.
Think of it as cloud storage, like music files or videos or e-mail that's stored on a bunch of servers all over the Internet rather than being stored on your own laptop's hard drive. If your laptop is destroyed, you can get a new one and download your cloud files onto it. That's how the Borg Queen works. That's why she was still alive in First Contact after Picard saw her get blown up at Wolf 359; why she was alive again in "Dark Frontier" after being dissolved in First Contact; and why she was alive again in "Unimatrix Zero" and "Endgame" after being blown up in "Dark Frontier."
There are plenty of possible other interpretations for what the Queen really is.
- Another glorified spokesperson, an interface no more significant than Locutus but with delusions of power programmed in for greater dramatic effectiveness? Probably not, considering how she has factual power to destroy Cubes left and right in "Unimatrix Zero".
- An emergent lifeform that lives in the Collective, having taken over its computing and other powers for her own use and pleasure? That would be truly analogous to what Queens are in the human society... At first, the Collective may even have seen utility value in the emergence, poor sods.
- An invasive lifeform that lives in the collective, having taken over its computing and other powers for her own use and pleasure? That would be even more apt, considering how her goals and the formerly stated goals of the Collective appear to differ quite radically. And a parasitic invader in an insect hive would be doubly chilling for us sensitive mammals who shudder at the sight of an ants' nest to begin with.
- An utility Drone with a bit of imagination and free will restored for the purposes of consulting in unconventional warfare? Such a potentially dangerous, unpredictable and subversive element would have to be kept well isolated from the rest of the Collective, explaining why she communicates with the Collective through the primitive means of speech.
If the complex operation of removing this software or malware from the Collective could somehow be performed, the Collective might return to a previous state of existence. We don't know when the Queen first emerged, though - in the first nanosecond of Collectiveness, or half a million years later? One interesting scenario would see the Collective return (?) to its stated ideals of improving the quality of life for everybody they encounter, without the imperialistic steps taken in pursuing this goal under the Queen's command. Another would see the Collective lose all "humanity" and become either a more devious or a more straightforward assimilation machine. Perhaps the Borg would stop "tickling" societies with single-vessel "invasions" that merely prompt the victims to develop newer and better countermeasures for future assimilation, and would simply subjugate the whole galaxy in a matter of days?
Timo Saloniemi
- Another glorified spokesperson, an interface no more significant than Locutus but with delusions of power programmed in for greater dramatic effectiveness? Probably not, considering how she has factual power to destroy Cubes left and right in "Unimatrix Zero".
- An emergent lifeform that lives in the Collective, having taken over its computing and other powers for her own use and pleasure? That would be truly analogous to what Queens are in the human society... At first, the Collective may even have seen utility value in the emergence, poor sods.
- An invasive lifeform that lives in the collective, having taken over its computing and other powers for her own use and pleasure? That would be even more apt, considering how her goals and the formerly stated goals of the Collective appear to differ quite radically. And a parasitic invader in an insect hive would be doubly chilling for us sensitive mammals who shudder at the sight of an ants' nest to begin with.
- An utility Drone with a bit of imagination and free will restored for the purposes of consulting in unconventional warfare? Such a potentially dangerous, unpredictable and subversive element would have to be kept well isolated from the rest of the Collective, explaining why she communicates with the Collective through the primitive means of speech.
If the complex operation of removing this software or malware from the Collective could somehow be performed, the Collective might return to a previous state of existence. We don't know when the Queen first emerged, though - in the first nanosecond of Collectiveness, or half a million years later? One interesting scenario would see the Collective return (?) to its stated ideals of improving the quality of life for everybody they encounter, without the imperialistic steps taken in pursuing this goal under the Queen's command. Another would see the Collective lose all "humanity" and become either a more devious or a more straightforward assimilation machine. Perhaps the Borg would stop "tickling" societies with single-vessel "invasions" that merely prompt the victims to develop newer and better countermeasures for future assimilation, and would simply subjugate the whole galaxy in a matter of days?
Timo Saloniemi
Better still we're seeing multiple different individuals (played by two different actresses) who are sucessive Queens.
I wonder if there could be a hierarchy of upper Borg leadership, "junior queens" who manage subdivisions within the Borg, each with their own groups of ships and slave-drones. This could explain the presence of queens on both cubes destroyed over Earth, while still having a unimatrix Queen in the Delta Quad.
Okay Christopher, how could there be a Queen in the Enterprise E's engine room, there were very few drones who beamed over prior to the sphere's destruction.
My read is that the Queen (junior queen?) evacuated the cube into the sphere when the cube's imminent destruction was obvious to her. Than she beamed herself over to the Enterprise, and as a individual was controling the existing and new drones onboard, without the benefit of any connection to the main collective.
Are you saying that the few dozen drones (disconnected from the main collective) were generating a queen, who then controled them?
They're Borg. They don't have individuals. That's the whole point. A hive mind isn't a collection of different individuals, it's one single individual consciousness made up of multiple different bodies/minds linked in a single network.
Remember the Queen's lines in First Contact:
The entire Borg Collective is one mind, one "person." And it was speaking through the Queen. The "I" in its statements was not in reference to the female drone that we saw speaking; it was in reference to the Collective as a whole, with the Queen being simply its mouthpiece, or its coordinating node.
The books have established that there can be more than one Queen, and that isolated subsets of the Collective can have local Queens. But it's mistakenly anthropomorphic to call that "leadership." Your frontal lobe doesn't lead the rest of your brain, it's just a key part of a single unified whole.
Well, first of all, I think you're glossing over the distinction between the body of the Queen, which hosts the central coordinating software of the collective mind, and the consciousness that speaks through the Queen, which is the entire collective mind itself.Okay Christopher, how could there be a Queen in the Enterprise E's engine room, there were very few drones who beamed over prior to the sphere's destruction.
My read is that the Queen (junior queen?) evacuated the cube into the sphere when the cube's imminent destruction was obvious to her. Than she beamed herself over to the Enterprise, and as a individual was controling the existing and new drones onboard, without the benefit of any connection to the main collective.
Are you saying that the few dozen drones (disconnected from the main collective) were generating a queen, who then controled them?
Granted, once this group of Borg went back in time, it was cut off from the rest of the Collective; this was, after all, a major plot point. So the size of the collective mind that was coordinated by the Queen was greatly diminished, yes. That's why the Borg started assimilating the crew so aggressively -- to bring its size and processing power up to a more functional level. So yes, granted, the Queen alone can probably function as a "seed" for an entire Collective, so long as she has beings she can assimilate. In that sense, she is like an insect queen, the member of the hive that can produce new drones. But that doesn't make her a separate individual from the drones; once she and the drones are networked together, then by definition, the collective mind exists in all of them equally at once, no matter how large or small the collective is. The larger it gets, the smarter and faster it gets and the more knowledge it has at its disposal.
Note that the Queen aboard the Ent-E didn't appear and start speaking until after a significant number of crewmembers had been assimilated. That suggests that the consciousness we think of as "the Queen" was impaired, incomplete, until it added enough new brains to the diminished collective to reach a suitable level of processing power. If you took the physical body of a Borg Queen and isolated it from the entire Borg hive mind, it probably wouldn't have the same complete personality that the Queen manifests. She might not be just another liberated drone, because of the specialized core programming that's concentrated in her, but she'd just be one piece of the whole mind.
The real world reason? The bean-counters at Paramount made the filmmakers add one, so the viewers would have somebody to relate to.
The Movellans were the machine creatures (androids). Daleks are living beings, mutated squid-thingies that used to be humanoid. They live their entire lives inside heavily armed personal mini-tanks, so people often mistake them for robots. But they are organic creatures, and despite the claims of "Destiny of the Daleks," they're anything but coldly logical, since they're driven entirely by hate and xenophobia. The premise that they were evenly matched with the Movellans because they were equally dispassionate and logical was a mistake, one of the biggest flaws in a weak storyline.
That's the interpretation I prefer but it seems inconsistent with Seven having been a proto- or protege Queen, if there's no distinction then there's no need for training/preparation or even intermediates.
There's no inconsistency at all. Just because the Queen isn't a separate person, that doesn't mean she isn't a specialized category of drone. After all, she plays a key role in the Collective, its central coordinator and source of volition. She's not separate from the mind of the Collective as a whole, but she is a focal point and guiding element within it.
Again, let me remind you, we have seen the Queen's physical body die multiple times, and yet the Queen endures as a continuous entity. The Queen that Picard met in First Contact was unambiguously the same being that Picard had seen destroyed in "The Best of Both Worlds," not some kind of "successor" or "heir to the throne." That alone proves that the consciousness of the Queen is not housed in a single physical body. That body is the platform on which it runs, the hardware component of the Queen; but the software component, the Queen's "personality," is stored in the cloud, distributed through the entire Collective. When one Queen body dies, the next of the specialized drones has the Royal Protocol downloaded into her and becomes the Queen, the nexus that coordinates and directs the activity of the rest of the Collective.
I agree completely.
Only if you refuse to accept the premise of the Queen as prime coordination node for the collective. As Greg has stated repeatedly, she isn't a person, she's a presence. When she speaks to the collective, it's a metaphorical conversation presented as dialog for the audience. What's actually happening is going on across the collective as terabytes of information being processed in nanoseconds. The only time/s she did this aloud 'for realies' was when Janeway or Picard were present, or any number of other non-Borg, so they would understand what was going on around them.
When you realize she's just a pair of eyes for the collective to use to look at the datastream all at once and from there make decisions that affect the collective as a whole, and that the mind involved isn't in the body but is rather all around it, it becomes much, much creepier. This physical entity has no will of its own, despite appearances. It's just a drone with working vocal chords.
When you realize she's just a pair of eyes for the collective to use to look at the datastream all at once and from there make decisions that affect the collective as a whole, and that the mind involved isn't in the body but is rather all around it, it becomes much, much creepier. This physical entity has no will of its own, despite appearances. It's just a drone with working vocal chords.
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Err, that was me, not Greg.
Yeah, that's how I choose to interpret the Queen's scenes in "Unimatrix Zero." It was rather silly to present her as actually bringing drones before her and giving them verbal orders, when she's in direct mental contact with all of them at once.
Well, it's a bit more than that. That's what Locutus was, a mouthpiece for the collective mind. The Queen is more like a key part of the collective brain, the part that gives it volition and directs its attention. That's why I've been likening her to the frontal lobe of the human brain.
Sorry for the misidentification, Christopher. It's hard not to conflate the two of you, as you both write Star Trek novels, and I don't. 
Only if I do what you require? No.
If you wish. But don't then come running to me when canon requires it of you. If a film comes out, or a new series begins running, produced by Paramount/CBS of course, where it is stated that what Christopher has said is true, are you going to not believe it because you don't agree or don't like it? Why must the Borg have no single voice controlling their actions? Isn't that the idea behind a hive mind, that they all speak with a single voice, following a singular course of action? What's so bad about the storytelling device of giving that voice to a single actor to give it menace for the audience to identify with?
Wow. Running to you? Seriously?!? Don't worry, I won't!
Anyway, with respect to coping with canon: been there, done that. STV was very liberating in terms of getting over issues I had with canon, but then again so were TMP and "Encounter At Farpoint."
Right. Hearing the Collective speak through the Queen is no different from hearing it speak through the chorus of voices introduced in "Q Who." It's the same consciousness speaking in both cases; only the manner in which we hear it differs.
Although I'd assume that the usual "We are the Borg biological distinctiveness yadda yadda" spiel is more a sort of autonomous reflex that the Collective engages in when it encounters someone new, but if the Queen (or a lesser conduit like Locutus or pre-liberation Seven) is speaking to you, that means you've actually gotten the Collective's conscious attention.
If there was no difference, the Queen wouldn't have been introduced by the aforementioned corporate bean counters. The fact is that most people don't intellectualize this far. They DO see the Queen as a personalization of the impersonal Borg, and as an individual. I agree with a great deal of your explanation of what we should be thinking is actually happening in front of our eyes (although, as stated by another poster, the Queen could be an emergent interloper or an alien interloper); but most moviegoers and tv watchers won't keep the concept of the Queen as focal node front and center in their minds as they watch. They will react to the Queen as an individual, however erroneous this perception and reception might be.
Short version: the vocal chorus is super-creepy and frightening in its multiplicity and in how it dramatizes the terrifying subjugation of individualism that is the core of Borgdom. The Queen, with her normal voice and single humanoid shape, comes across as another ho-hum villain (to me, anyway) compared to the vocal-chorus-as-Borg, no matter how I think of her.
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